We're not architects, we're not historians and we don't know much about anything. However we do like modern houses and Christchurch is a great place for them.
If you know of a house that deserves a mention please let us know. If we've made a mistake, do the same. If you like the site, tell your friends. If you hate the site, tell your friends you like it anyway. It's a minor white lie that anyone would forgive.

Bad news. Sad news. The great architect Maurice Mahoney has died in his 90th year. When Maurice teamed up with Miles Warren in 1958 to establish New Zealand’s greatest 20th century design partnership, the two architects were unstoppable. They revolutionised architecture in New Zealand, developing the distinctive ‘Christchurch Style’ which, let’s face it, was the Warren & Mahoney style.

A low-pitched survivor built in ’69 from Canadian Oregon and trusty concrete blocks in the modern ranch style. The interior is a masterclass in spatial arrangement with Don using partial-height walls, glass partitions and his trademark sliding shoji screens.

Don Cowey designed this Mt Pleasant house for his mum in 1953, He was straight out of architecture school, aged 25, and built it together with his mates Allan Mitchener and Allan Wild. Sixty years later it was sadly demolished due to earthquake damage and lovingly reimagined by Bridget and Duval O’Neill.

Oh dear. This abandoned, sad-looking orphan was once a striking, modern home with a mix of vertical and horizontal timber weatherboards and a great big Oamaru stone fireplace at its heart. C’mon, look into those big, pleading eyes (or windows) and say it’s not worth saving!?

Interesting. An early Peter Beaven design -prior to his Scandinavian phase and long before his jaunty ‘gothic’ modernism – uncharacteristically riffing off the international style with a flat roof and living room wall of glass. Sweet, original condition too.

This house is FOR RENT. Just saying. It sits at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, in a pocket of what must be the city’s highest concentration of homes in the Christchurch Style, yet Mitchener’s 1964 design stands apart as a great example of the breed and one of Christchurch’s best small houses of the time.

Peter Beaven was never conventional: in 1975, aged 50, he disbanded his successful Christchurch practice, packed a suitcase and moved to London where he worked alone from a bedsit. During that time he designed these six houses in the Christchurch Style, evolving ideas he developed a decade earlier in Christchurch’s Tonbridge Mews and Wellington’s Habitat Housing. Bravo.

Ernest Kalnins is a man for whom we have scant information. He was an Austrian designer, artist and (non-registered) architect who designed this family home on upper Clifton Hill for Dulcie and Tom Flint, owners of a large Stationery shop on Manchester Street. In the 60s, the top of Clifton Hill was a sparsely populated, almost agricultural, bohemian suburb with some of the best views in Christchurch.

Huh? A 1937 reinforced concrete farmhouse with clear Corbusian and Bauhaus influences, hidden on the coast south of Kaikora? The Wilding property, now an Angus beef farmstead called Te Mania, was built by some pretty hip graziers.

Gavin Francis Willis is an architect still active in Christchurch. He designed this beautiful house for himself back in the 60s and still lives here (and who can blame him). It’s a crisp, modernist Scandinavian-style family home, clearly much-loved and an excellent, intact expression of the Christchurch Style. The design owes a lot to Miles Warren and Holger Henning Hansen, but if you’re going to steal, you may as well steal from the best.

This is the second house S’Miles designed for his buddy Garth Gould on a sunny spot above Halswell Quarry. The first house, its neighbour, was sold and subsequently messed with quite a bit, but this one is very original (kitchen and family room aside) with lots of good W&M detail. Garth talks about the old days below.

Turns out, there’s a little bit of Miles in the Hutt. For Wellingtonians who like a little Christchurch Modern, we present the first MJ Foster House – five years before going the whole hog in Havelock North, MJ commissioned this Lower Hutt pixie as a test run.